Today on the pod, Dina and I talk about holding the ache of the empty nest and the excitement of what a third act might hold simultaneously, the odyssey of the “male genius” and whether any of them will ever take a note along the way? We’re looking at you Chris Nolan and Steven Spielberg (lol, they’re not sweating it), and the very real pain of losing close friends when the request to “agree to disagree” means you have to accept not all people are deserving of empathy, dignity, and bodily autonomy. A line many of us are not willing to cross.

Also, the horror, despair, and heartbreak of recognizing your old friend is now standing on the other side of that line.

That’s the nutshell version of our conversation, but as ever, we dug in. We both have older teenage/young adult kids on the cusp of their own heroes’ journeys, and the mixed bag of pride and unending love, along with mourning for the days of chubby arms around our necks, waists, legs, is real. So is the joy of the new kinds of adventures you have with your adult kids.

We both saw Disclosure Day, and Dina just saw The Odyssey, and wrote about her feelings, too, so after you listen to this conversation, if you’d like more (you will) you’ll find her essay here. Get ready for gems like this, which you’ll also hear in our talk,

It can’t be that hard to imagine a version of Helen who, bored with her Spartan trinkets and grossed out by Menelaus scratching his balls with the same hand he eats with, manifests a different future for herself.

So yes, we laughed a lot. I wrote about losing a friend this week, but also about the pain of being asked to pretend things aren’t what they are. There were some tears in this episode, too. You can find my essay here. This is the heart of it,

One thing I dislike with the heat of a thousand suns is the feeling that arises when someone says they love you, but wants you to stand in a field of horse manure and pretend it smells like roses. Being asked to behave like things are not as they are, or to carry on after something hurtful has happened without any kind of acknowledgement, is an invitation to betray yourself so someone else can feel comfortable. That’s the moment love starts dying on the vine. What’s the point of standing there, smiling with sad eyes while we murder any chance of intimacy or trust between us? The first time someone asks won’t be the last. The first time is a test, and failing is the only way you win.

It’s always such a joy to be in conversation with all of you.

Sending you so much love. Watch out for those Trojan horses ;)

Ally & Dina

A conversation with my son about what it means to be a good man.

It’s been a minute since I did a podcast without a guest, but this week’s episode is me, talking to you, about a thing we can all agree is never a good idea — namely, jumping to conclusions. I am someone who has always taken my time figuring out what to make of people, situations, ideas, and even my own thoughts once in a while.

Some of that might be my nature, some of it is surely nurture. I grew up in an environment where it made sense to pay attention to the clues, to test the waters, to look for any change in the weather, in an effort to keep the peace, and keep myself safe. Maybe you relate, and understand I don’t mean the literal weather. Old habits die hard.

However, sometimes people make it exceedingly easy to figure out whether you want to ride the ride. They might say something so demeaning about women and girls, you no longer have to wonder about what kind of person they are, or what kind of values they hold. If a man said he grabs women by the pussy — you would know without any doubt, that man has no respect for women at all, and would not be a man you would want to encounter alone.

You would not trust him with your daughters, or anyone’s daughters. Certainly not a country-full of daughters. That is not a man who is going to be thinking about women as equal, full-bodied human beings who deserve dignity and respect and the same rights as boys and men. It’s clear as day.

If a man said assault victims should “just take some responsibility for themselves” to avoid being attacked and, “act like an adult for f***s sake” and stay away from alcohol so they don’t end up in “a compromising situation” you would also know this is not a safe man, and not a man who respects women or understands the world we’re living in. You wouldn’t need to spend more time deciding if this was the man to represent your interests as a candidate, unless you didn’t care about the interests of girls and women. He’s spelling it out for you across the sky.

The Maya Angelou quote comes to mind, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Or to give it a timely spin, “When someone shows you they’re a predatory-abusive-rapey-misogynistic-narcissist, believe them the first time.”

There is a human desire to twist ourselves in knots when we don’t want a thing to be true, or we want something so much, we are willing to convince ourselves what we’re seeing or hearing is not really that bad. When the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tapes came out, people who wanted to vote for the president said, “It’s just locker room talk.” But that is predator-talk. That is malignant narcissist-talk. That is misogynistic talk. That is the talk of a man who believes the rules do not apply to him.

Progressives who stuck with Platner, overlooking one scandal after another, saying “Conservatives don’t care if their candidates are predators, so Progressives shouldn’t, either,” and, “Way to go with your purity tests, hope you’re happy when Susan Collins wins” … seem to have forgotten the foundation of the Progressive Party, which is all people deserve to be treated with dignity. If you are going to throw girls and women outside the circle of care instantly because you want to “win” — you will be winning more of what we already have. No thanks.

Here’s another question on my mind this week — how many times can you lie to people before they stop believing you at all? There’s “flooding the zone” with constant mayhem which exhausts people, but there’s also the never-ending river of gaslighting. I can see how exhausting people might work in their favor, but the constant lies have created a scenario where they have no credibility with anyone who is sane. I cannot see how that’s a good thing. That’s where we are now. Maybe that’s the downside to “alternate facts.”

That’s why people were clamoring for “proof of life” from the office of Mitch McConnell, and why those requests reached a crescendo over the weekend. Even when they put out a picture of Mitch with his wife on Sunday, people wondered if it was AI generated, or a recirculated picture that was released in 2023. Hey tech bro billionaires, y’all are the ones who just love your environment-destroying AI, so enjoy the chaos. Apparently the photo is real, and as long as Mitch keeps voting against the SAVE Act, he is not my top concern.

Lindsey Graham dying Saturday night of a “brief and sudden illness” — which seems to be the result of aortic rupture/cardiac arrest — was certainly unexpected, especially while everyone was looking at Mitch McConnell. His younger sister’s appointment by the governor to finish out his term is not so strange. Spouses take over in these cases frequently, and Lindsey Graham was not married.

I don’t have anything else I’m going to say about Graham right now, except I believe he knew what was going to happen in 2016, he knew without a doubt he’d been right after January 6th, 2021, and he could not find the moral fortitude to do what was necessary for the country. He will go down in history as one of this president’s great enablers, and that is a real shame for him and horrendous for us.

The two stories that broke my heart last week were the ones that left two families shattered. ICE agents shot a husband and father-of-three, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an unarmed business-owner on his way to work. Of course they said he “weaponized his car and they shot him in self-defense” (script lifted from the Kristi Noem presser about the Renee Good murder), and of course they were not wearing their body-cams. They tried to blame the Dems. The medical examiner ruled Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death a homicide.

Lastly, the investigation into the death of Nolan Xavier Wells in Mississippi is ongoing. I will go ahead and warn you, I broke down fully talking about this because I am a mom with a son the same age, and the thought of what Nolan’s family is going through as they try to get answers about a story that makes no sense is so painful. I talked about the conversations all parents of white children need to be having with their kids. The thought of whatever Nolan went through at the end is hard to bear, and once again, there is no such thing as other people’s children. It’s why I saved this story for the end.

I genuinely hope we do a better job of taking care of each other soon, friends. Life does not have to feel this way. We could be loving each other, and staring at the stars.

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When Lauren Hough sets off on a road trip across America with Woody, her husky mix and constant companion, it’s partly because there are always reasons not to take the trip. Always reasons not to sit by the redwoods, swim in the creeks, see the ocean.

Sometimes people wait so long for the perfect time to embark on an adventure like this, they never see the places they always wanted to see, and then it’s too late.

It was partly because Texas Highways kept sending her out on the road to cover stories, and Lauren likes to drive. But also, it was because the internet had “broken her brain.” In Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America, Lauren captures the experience of being chronically online, and what it’s doing all of us. Things you can’t do while driving: scroll on your phone, answer texts, check Twitter.

It’s easy to dehumanize people on a device, we all know this. It’s another thing to be on the receiving end of a wild lack of compassion when you’re going through a tragedy — personally or collectively. If you live in places like Texas, Florida, California — any state with extreme weather that is also hated by “the left” or “the right” — then you know how it feels.

It was brutal to be in the midst of wildfires in California, for example, watching them devour entire neighborhoods overnight, while people online were saying, “Whatever, those celebrities will just buy new mansions next week.” Haha, super funny. Let me check the app again to see if I need to evacuate with my kids and my dog, and the artwork from their childhoods and the photographs I can fit in my trunk.

We’ve all had our less-than-compassionate moments, though, it’s a sign of these times. I’ve had so many conversations with the kindest people I know, and that is the worst lament of all — “I’m a good person, I’ve never wished ill on anyone, I don’t want to be this enraged all the time. I don’t want to feel hate in my heart.”

Lauren crosses America with Woody in tow, and meets all kinds of people along the way — because, Woody. People you might dismiss or even disparage online, but in person, everything changes. In Monster of a Land, you see the country with Lauren, and the people in it through her eyes, and realize maybe all this rage is misdirected. The ideas you might have had about how a place would look when you got there, or how the people would be if you stopped to chat…what if they were all wrong? What if the enemy isn’t who you think it is?

What if we could solve everything by being a lot kinder to one another … and opening some local pubs? Checking on our neighbors? That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

We had such a great conversation. Lauren very generously read four passages from her incredible book. I hope you enjoy the talk. I know you’ll enjoy the ride. Monster of a Land: In Search of Modern America comes out June 16th, but you can order it now! It’s the road trip for our times.

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This episode is about the two different justice systems that exist: one for clean-cut, well-off white boys and men, and another for the rest of us. This topic was spurred on by Judge Nicholas Rowland’s devastatingly lenient sentencing of three teenage boys in the U.K. on May 21st — but this is, infuriatingly and unconscionably — nothing new. Start paying attention to cases like these, and there’s no missing it. We talked about assault in a straightforward way because sadly, it is a fact of life.

We’d love for that to change.

When girls and women accuse “upstanding” young white men of rape — men like Brock Turner, Jesse Mack Butler, Mason Lee Gipson, Christopher Belter, Reuben Vanstiphout, Steven van de Velde, and Jacob Walter Anderson to name a few — judges will focus on their “promise and potential”, leaving the girls or women in the courtroom (and the ones watching from elsewhere), to wonder about the intrinsic value of their own lives, and if there might be anything special about the future that lies ahead of them. You wouldn’t think so listening to these judges, or looking at the sentences they give out.

Media rags will describe these violent young men as “baby-faced” and put them on the cover for weeks if the cases are high profile enough and it will help them sell papers. It’s been happening for as long as I can remember, back before Robert Chambers, though he was on the cover of newspapers for months on end. “The Preppy Murder” they called it, and even at fifteen, I wondered about Jennifer Levin’s mother, and how she must feel.

They described him as a “handsome altar boy”, but that was a narrative painted by his legal team. The truth was a lot darker, but it didn’t matter because he was selling papers. If he hadn’t been so arrogant, I have no doubt that judge would have been talking about his promise and potential eventually, but he got drunk at a party and decided to act out the murder on a Barbie and laugh about it. So he went to jail. That’s how far a guy has to go to pay for what he did. He has to strangle a Barbie on camera and laugh about it while he says, “Oops, I think I killed it.”

That’s when a judge will think twice about saying he has “promise.”

We talked about what it feels like to know as a girl and as a woman, this is what’s in store if you come forward, and, importantly, we talked about how to change things at home, in the judicial system, and in the world at large. Parents, aunties, anyone who has children, preteens and teens in their lives, please take note (without those young ears around). We talked about rehabilitation in the context of incarceration.

Huge love to the fabulous Dina Honour, you can find her brilliant essay on the topic here. My essay about this heartbreaking reality is here. I would be so appreciative if you would sign this petition started by award winning Criminal Behavioural Analyst Laura Richards to Investigate Judge Nicholas Rowland and Introduce Judicial Accountability Framework Now. We really can’t go on this way, it isn’t good for anyone.

Sending you lots of love, friends. Thank you to all who were with us live, and thank you to those who listen later. It is so wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Ally and Dina

This episode is all about love, and I am so thankful I got to dig into this topic with these two fantastic human beings and phenomenal writers. Kate’s novel, Book of Grace, is a sweeping, epic love story that cannot be stopped by time, loss, death — or all the different ways women sometimes prevent themselves from following their inner compass because they put themselves last on the list.

It asks the questions, how do we love what doesn’t stay? How do we give people grace when they can’t choose us, they can’t choose themselves, or they tell us goodbye for other reasons? Is our love still valid and worthwhile?

How would life be if people were their best and highest selves when life handed them curveballs — even painful ones? What would that look like, and what could grow if forgiveness was the soil? What if we didn’t hold on so tightly to our vision of how things should be, and instead allowed something wild and unexpected to take root and flourish?

Is it possible we’d be amazed? Is it possible everyone under the tree would blossom?

As if to answer those very questions, Katrina’s book, Hurricane Lessons: A memoir of betrayal and becoming is about the unraveling of her twenty-year marriage, and the reclamation of her true self. Sometimes you walk into a Pilates studio thinking you’re there to strengthen your core, and it turns your life inside out. The experience blows through your family like a hurricane.

You will be rooting for Katrina every step of the way, but you probably know that just from listening to the talk.

We talked about grief. We talked about complicated grief, and how relationships don’t end when people die. We could have talked for hours.

I cannot recommend these books enough. These are strange times in our country. There is a persistent and intentional attack on women’s rights, on the LGBTQ community, on women who have decided not to have children, and women who have children, but no support. There are systemic issues like the gender pay gap, a lack of affordable childcare, PTO, affordable healthcare, and a continued pressure for women to carry the mental load for everyone.

These are the stories we need in the world right now. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did (the joy) and I hope you will order these incredible books if you can!

Also, big shoutout and so much gratitude to everyone who showed up to be with us live! Elissa Altman thank you for making us laugh, pretty sure the thumbnail attached here is thanks to you, and Paul Crenshaw thank you for this incredible Jack Gilbert poem you recommended when we were talking about reframing relationships that end. A divorce is not a failure. It’s simply a relationship that ended.

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It has been hard lately, a thing I was writing about this week in French Toast for the Table — and something Dina was also writing about in her essay, If Men Are in Crisis, I Know Something That Might Help (Shhh…It’s Feminism).

For those of us who grew up with chaos, uncertainty and violence, and learned hyper-vigilance as a tool of survival, waking up in this country day after day feels all-too-familiar. It’s an ongoing assault on the nervous system to hear the voices of smug men spewing contempt toward women, Black people, brown people, the LGBTQ community, the immigrant community, survivors of abuse, or anyone who doesn’t please them, for any number of reasons — from the highest offices in the land.

Of course it’s not just their words, it’s the real-life consequences that follow. We knew when they overturned Roe women and girls would suffer, and — in many cases — lose their lives. Maternal and infant mortality rates have gone up in every state with restrictive abortion bans because that’s how it works.

Then they started talking about the SAVE Act.

The president canceled all funding for DEI programs in the government and in public schools and universities, refused funding for schools teaching critical race theory, and demanded all red states racially gerrymander their maps so he could try to retain his tiny majority stronghold in the House and Senate. Of course he didn’t say the quiet part out loud.

Now the Voting Rights Act is gutted.

The Epstein survivors get no justice, but the perpetrators of heinous crimes get their names blurred. Women couldn’t get a credit card or bank account in their own names until 1974, landlords could refuse to rent apartments to single mothers until 1988, and female senators were not allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor until 1993. We still have a gender pay gap.

I believe in my heart there are more of us who want the world to be a kind and loving place than there are people who are cruel and depraved, or pathologically self-serving. And I know there are many of us wondering what brought us to this precipice where we now find ourselves, and what do we need to do to gather everyone up, and head in a much better direction?

I don’t know how we do anything if we can’t communicate. I have had conversations with men who think if you’re a feminist it means you “hate men” and that is not correct. Feminism means you believe in equal rights and opportunities for all people politically, socially and economically, regardless of gender. It means you want to dismantle the patriarchy because you realize it’s making us all very ill — even the men and boys it was set up to serve.

And while we’re here, “down with the patriarchy” does not mean “erasing male voices” — it means we make a circle where we put the most vulnerable people in the middle — the kids and the elderly. We make sure they’re safe. The rest of us are in that circle shoulder-to-shoulder, no one is on top.

White supremacy, patriarchy, and technocracy are the ties that bind. They are an intertwined beast. That’s the systemic part of teaching boys not to cry, not to be vulnerable. Painting ourselves into these corners where men can’t ask for help or show emotion is not helping and it’s not realistic, and telling women they are not allowed to be angry is the fastest way to be dealing with an angry woman.

Dina and I talked about intersectional feminism and what it is, patriarchy, white supremacy, the wide range of normal human emotion, and Somebody, Somewhere — among other things.

Not sure exactly how or why, but we end up laughing a lot. Which is good.

I hope you laugh, too. I hope you do whatever you need to do, all emotions are welcome. Please let us know how you’re feeling in the comments, and if you have any questions .

Sending you lots of love,

Ally and Dina

Huge thanks to everyone who showed up live to join for this conversation, and to everyone about to listen. This talk is for any woman who has been reeling since the CNN report about the “rape academy.” Much has been written in the last few weeks, especially by women trying to get our heads around the idea that it isn’t just desolate parking lots and dark streets where we aren’t safe, it isn’t just that we have to worry about what time of day we’re going running, it isn’t just that a man could slip something in a drink if we’re out with friends — it’s that now, it could be our husbands slipping something into our last cup of tea for the night. (Not all husbands.)

There’s a larger conversation to be had about what is happening when girls and women are not considered as intrinsically valuable as boys and men. (And it should be noted, and it was, that little boys are also victims of sexual assault). When that sentiment is weaved into the fabric of the stories we grow up with, the films we watch, and the messages we’re receiving everywhere we go, it’s the system that needs an overhaul.

This is also a talk for the men who are devastated, who love and respect the women in their lives, and who don’t want things to be this way. We wondered if some of them might not know how to help right now, or what to say, or what questions to ask. It’s a talk for the “not all men” men, and the ones who get furious over the “choose the bear” conversations. It’s a talk for anyone who would like things to be different, and so much better than this.

Here is Dina’s linked essay that we referenced, A Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and here are links to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (which was initially published in a magazine in 1892, so shoutout to me for randomly retaining bizarre facts in my head, but not remembering things from last week), and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates (do not read before bed or if you are feeling overwhelmed by everything already, it is very sad and very disturbing, but excellent. It has stayed with both Dina and me for 40 years, so do with that what you will). Here is my essay we were referencing, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Where do the motherless daughters run?

I would not say that we found answers or even that we were looking for answers today, but I would say we found the comfort and relief that comes from being together, and naming things — calling things what they are. Pulling the monster out from underneath the bed so it stops tormenting us, and making it sit down where we can all see it clearly and talk about it.

That’s a lot less scary to do with a whole group of people there with you, and it’s a start. Dina and I had such a marvelous time together, and it was such a joy to be with everyone in attendance. Amazing that we could be talking about such dark things, and come away feeling so much connection and joy. We hope you feel that as much as we do.

Love to every single one of you,

Ally and Dina

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First, if you are new to Come As You Are, I am so glad you’re here. Once in a while, an essay hits the right chord at the right moment, and I get to meet a whole bunch of new readers which is incredibly gratifying. Of course, it’s also devastating that the thing that brought us together is our horror over the news that there are men all over the world who have such little regard for the humanity of their own wives, they are drugging them, raping them, filming it — and uploading this content to websites where other men are happy to pay $20 in cryptocurrency to watch. Nonetheless, I am grateful to be in this conversation with such an empathetic group of people.

In this episode, I read the essay — a thing I don’t always do — and then talked about some of the issues we are all grappling with — what has happened that we’ve gotten to a place where something like this could occur? Why is it that such an alarming number of men from all walks of life are dehumanizing women this way? How do we get more of the good men to be part of this conversation, actively and loudly? Ultimately, how do we change things — because this is not sustainable or okay.

If you want to skip the essay part because you’ve read it, you can jump to minute 36. If you haven’t read the comments under the essay, I would encourage you to do that — there are so many women sharing their own stories and perspectives, and so many men who genuinely want to help. In almost 200 comments, there is only one mansplainer, and I feel pretty certain he used AI to help him write his response —which is so on-brand if you wrote it into a TV script, you’d get a note back that it was too “on the nose.”

There are a lot of stories right now that are difficult to process. My heart is absolutely shattered for the Elkins/Pugh families in Shreveport, Louisiana. My heart is also broken for the children of Cerina and Justin Fairfax, who now have to live without both of their parents, because their father killed their mother and then himself, while the kids were in the house. Their sixteen-year-old son made the 911 call. In both cases, the wives had asked for a divorce. It is worth noting the most dangerous time for women in domestic violence situations is the time period right after they try to leave.

There were some who misread the CNN report about the Rape Academy and the 62 million views, and thought that meant there were 62 million men who watched. It could be there were 31 million men who visited the site twice a day. It could be they went to the site to watch other content, and only some percentage watched the unconscious wives who had no idea they were being raped and filmed.

However many men, it was is too many. If there were 70-plus men who took part in the Pelicot case in France for years — in addition to Gisele’s husband, and there are women in the U.K. and Canada and Poland and the U.S. whose husbands are also doing this, I think we need to assume it’s happening everywhere. There are multiple sites hosting this content, not just the one. There is a chat room for men who want to learn how to do this to their own wives.

Trying to make this conversation about math right now is not the move — unless you want to out yourself as a man who genuinely doesn’t care, and likes things the way they are. I am happy and thankful to say there aren’t any men like that in the comments section, or anywhere in my life. Nor will there be.

I am hopeful that men who have been saying “not all men” will take this opportunity to start having conversations with the boys and men in their own lives, and to reflect on how they feel about women, genuinely. We have a systemic problem. If you aren’t clear on that, please educate yourself about rape cases in the U.S. generally. Please educate yourself about custody rulings when there has been abuse and a mother asks for supervised visitation. Please educate yourself about marital rape laws, because while marital rape is illegal in all 50 states, in 30 of those states, there are loopholes. As in today, right now.

When more than half the population in a society is being devalued, disrespected, demeaned, degraded or abused, that society is in jeopardy. There is no “male loneliness epidemic” but there is a male violence epidemic that needs to be talked about, understood, and rooted out — and we definitely need the good men in this conversation, talking to the men and boys in their sphere of influence.

We don’t need you to save us, we aren’t damsels and I think every one of us can look around and see this isn’t a fairytale. Even a Grimm fairytale is less dark and twisted than whatever this is. But we do need and want you to get involved. We all deserve a better story.

Sending love to all, old friends and new.

Come As You Are is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

No one has ever heard a podcast episode this good. It’s amazing, people are saying it’s incredible — they’ve never heard anything like it in their entire lives.

Can you imagine speaking about yourself like you were the most amazing person ever to grace planet earth — meanwhile you’re just a mean old windbag who thinks Hannibal Lecter was an asylum seeker? Someone pass the fava beans.

This week I read the essay and then talked about lying. It fascinates me when people lie with conviction, or knowingly support people who lie — without a hint of remorse or hesitation.

There are reasons good people might have a hard time saying true things, and I talked about that, too. Ultimately, though, if you want to have meaningful relationships, calling things what they are is part of the deal. It’s also grounding if you grew up with chaos and violence, or spent time trying to make everything okay for everyone all the time.

The truth isn’t always easy, but dealing with things as they are is a lot easier than pretending things are okay when they aren’t — or pretending this president should be compared to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. That was not a typo.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Sending you a lot of love, friends. Happy Easter if you celebrate. Happy Sunday if not. Either way, thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

Come As You Are is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for being here xo